Electors can deny Trump presidency

Thursday

Nov 24, 2016 at 2:01 AM

The Constitution provides a way to avoid a Trump presidency by empowering electors who vote by ballot for president and vice president. Nothing requires an elector to vote for the candidate winning the popular vote in his or her state.

Although voting to reflect the state’s popular vote is by far the most common, throughout our nation’s history 82 electoral votes have been cast otherwise. Such votes are authorized by the letter of the Constitution.

Such votes also come within the spirit of the Constitution. Electors were not created simply to perform a mechanistic ritual. Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that we have electors because they are “most capable of analyzing the qualities [of a candidate] adapted to the station,” and that having electors “affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in a eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Clinton won the national popular vote. Trump lacks the qualifications to be president and would put the country and the world in jeopardy. These are good reasons for an elector to demonstrate the sound judgment that he or she was elected to provide.